AMD Quietly Adds Two New Processors into FX Lineup

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday officially added two new FX-series microprocessors into its product lineup. The new quad-core and six-core microprocessors will server performance-mainstream users looking primarily for high-performance in modern video games, but who do not want to spend a lot. The chips have been on sale for over a month now, so their appearance in the price-list is barely a surprise.

The new microprocessors are quad-core AMD FX-4350 and six-core AMD FX-6350, both are based on Piledriver micro-architecture and support all the modern instructions and technologies. The new central processing units feature much higher (200MHz – 400MHz) clock-speeds than previous offerings and therefore it is logical to expect decent performance gains over predecessors. Officially, AMD FX-4350 is priced at $122 in 1000-unit tray quantities, whereas the FX-6350 costs $132. Their specifications are as follows:

AMD FX-6350 - six-core, 3.90GHz/4.20GHz, 6MB L2 + 8MB L3 cache, 125W

AMD FX-4350 - quad-core, 4.20GHz/4.30GHz, 4MB L2 + 8MB L3 cache, 125W

AMD FX "Vishera" central processing units sport up to eight Piledriver (second-generation Bulldozer) x86 cores with 1MB L2 per core, dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, 8MB L3 cache, Turbo Core 3.0 dynamic performance boosting technology and new instructions. Piledriver has a more precise branch predictor and a larger instruction window. The execution units of Piledriver acquired an enhanced scheduler and learned to process individual instructions faster, such as integer and floating-point division, for example. Moreover, AMD claims that they have increased the L1 TLB size and improved the data prefetch and arbitrating algorithms in the L2 cache. Piledriver x86 cores use a new resonant clock mesh technology developed by Cyclos Semiconductor, which allows to cut power consumption by 10%, or boost clock-speed by 10% (compared to Bulldozer) without increase of TDP.

Despite of high core count and high clock-speeds, AMD chips cannot offer performance comparable to Intel Corp.’s Core i7-3770K as well as Core i5-3570K “Ivy Bridge” microprocessors, which is why AMD has to sell its premium chips at affordable prices.